Los Angeles: 'Man boiled wife's body for four days'

Los Angeles
-
The real Chef from Hell may be David Viens, who told Los Angeles investigators that he boiled his wife in a vat for four days, until her skull was the only significant body part that remained.

Tuesday, Los Angeles Superior Court jurors heard the gruesome details on a recorded police interview in David Viens’ own voice. The confession was played for jurors in court during Viens’ murder trial.

"I just slowly cooked it and I ended up cooking her for four days," Viens could be heard saying on the recording, according to an Associated Press report.

Detectives recorded the interview as Viens recovered from self-inflicted injuries in a hospital on March 2011. Viens jumped from a 24-metre cliff in Rancho Palos Verdes after learning police considered him a suspect in his wife’s 2009 disappearance in 2009. The body of alleged victim, Dawn Viens, 39, was never recovered.

According to court records, Viens, whose injuries left him confined to a wheelchair during his trial, told investigators in the recorded interview that he “stuffed his wife's body in a 208-litre drum of boiling water and kept it submerged with weights.”

Viens told police he mixed what still remained of his wife’s body after four days “with other waste, dumping some of it in a grease pit at his restaurant in Lomita, and putting the rest in the trash.”

Police have searched the home and excavated the restaurant among other locations but found no evidence of the woman’s body.

Sheriff's Sgt. Richard Garcia, on the recording, asks Viens what happened on Oct. 18, 2009, the night his wife disappeared.